One More Taste (One and Only Texas #2)(62)
Knox opened and closed his mouth, thrown for another loop. Murph knew her? “We’re friends.”
The other man, Big Tommy, shoved Knox’s shoulder. The next instant, he grabbed Knox’s shirt and twisted as he slammed Knox’s back against the side of the hood. In the corner of Knox’s vision, he saw a handful of other men walk out of the gym to watch the spectacle. “How ‘bout you give us your name and we’ll tell her you stopped by.”
Knox raised his hands in the universal signal of surrender. He could’ve fought these guys and gotten away relatively uninjured, but he definitely wouldn’t have won. “Wait … she lives here? At the gym?”
Big Tommy gave him a shake that rattled his teeth. “I smell bullshit.” He slammed Knox’s back against the truck again. “I’m pretty sure a friend would know where she lives.”
“Damn straight,” Murph said.
“Murph, she told us this might happen someday,” one of the men standing behind Big Tommy said.
“That what would happen?” Knox asked. Had Emily predicted that someone would come around the gym asking about her? Is that why she had bodyguard-types looking out for her? The bodyguards combined with her fake identity gave Knox a sick feeling in his stomach. Who are you running from, Emily? Before he could really contemplate that question, Murph brought out a cell phone and snapped a photo of Knox, then walked to the back of the truck and snapped a photo of the license plate.
“Knox?” came a woman’s voice behind the crowd. Emily, dressed in jeans and a snug red sweater was walking along the sidewalk in their direction. Her hair was down and tumbled over her shoulders in waves of curls. In her hands she cradled a paper coffee cup. “What are you doing here? How’d you find me?”
No sense in lying about that one. “Personnel file.”
“Are you … stalking me?”
Murph folded his arms over his chest. “Looks that way to me.”
Knox shoved Big Tommy’s hand away from his chest and stood tall. “No. Yes, actually.” Because he was kind of stalking her, even if his motivation was noble.
“Want me to make sure this creep never bugs you again?” Murph said.
Emily sipped her drink, pretending to contemplate the offer, then cast Knox a side-eye coupled with a sly smile that filled him with heat, like a gust of hot wind that swept through him and pulled him along in its wake, dragging his awareness closer to her until the world around her fell away. It was unlike any lust Knox had experienced before and he hated it. Never had he felt so pathetically out of control. Rock bottom, indeed.
He curled his toes and swayed, resisting the magnetic pull of her.
She took another drink, then tossed the cup in the trashcan next to the gym doors. “Thanks for the offer, Murph, but I have a soft spot for this particular creep.”
She did?
“If you’re sure,” Murph said. “But say the word and I’ll make sure he never looks at another woman that way again.”
Until that exact moment, he hadn’t been aware of looking at her any particular way. He balled his hands into fists in his pockets to keep from swabbing his face as he forcibly tried to relax his expression.
“Thanks, Murph. I’ve got your cell on speed dial, so keep it close in case I need to take you up on it,” Emily said, winking at Knox.
Knox huffed. What the hell kind of alternate universe had he stumbled into?
Big Tommy and Murph, along with their buddies, executed a slow, menacing walk back into the gym, fierce scowls on their faces and their eyes boring into Knox.
Knox smoothed a hand over his shirt and straightened his tie, trying to reclaim a fraction of his dignity.
“So, what brings you out stalking on this fine day?” Emily asked, that sly smile in place.
That now familiar electric heat slid up his spine again and wrapped around his chest and throat, squeezing the air from him every time he looked at her.
Are you ready for me to feed you the way you need to be fed?
Yes.
No. It could never be that way between them. Once had been too dangerous for both of them.
He shook the errant thoughts from his head and decided he was out of options except to give the truth to her straight. “The way you talked about your friend’s abusive relationship yesterday made me think you know a thing or two about what she’s going through. And Haylie mentioned that you sleep in your office at the resort most nights. After I saw you sleeping in there this morning, I got concerned about you, so I looked up your personnel file and violated just about every privacy law on the books because I needed to know if your situation at home was bad. Like your friend’s.”
The sly smile vanished as her expression went completely neutral. Was she pissed or flattered? He couldn’t tell.
“Hence the stalking,” she said.
“Yeah, I own that. Because then I got even more worried when I looked up the address from your personnel file and it came up as this gym.”
“I rent a studio on the second floor from Murph. As far as why I sometimes sleep in my office, I work long hours. Sometimes, the extra hour of sleep I get by sleeping there instead of commuting back and forth is worth it.”
A studio apartment above a gym? He knew what she made as an executive chef at the hotel, and she could certainly afford better than that. Which brought him back around to the question of why she used Murph and his tough guy friends as bodyguards. “So then I looked up your name and social security number, to search for clues about where you lived from another angle. There was no Emily Ford born the year you were. The information you provided Briscoe Ranch was falsified.”